It is important to accurately position surgical tools during surgery to allow the most effective treatment. One example includes surgery in relation to bones and joints, such as knee and hip replacement surgery. This may involve cutting, or otherwise shaping, bone and cartilage of the patient and securing implantable components thereto.
This requires the surgical tools to be accurately configured relative to the patient such that the surgical tool can operate in accordance with the surgical plan. This may involve apparatus and systems that assist the surgeon to guide the surgical tool to the desired position.
As an example, a positioning guide may be placed relative to anatomical features of the patient. Anatomical features may include portions of the surface of the bone, cartilage and soft tissue constructs. The surgeon may then position surgical tools relative to the positioning guide. The positioning guide may then assist a blade to cut the bone, assist drilling into the bone, assist insertion of pins into the bone, and/or assist positioning and securing an implant to the bone. However, a positioning guide needs to be made for a specific patient before surgery and may be limited to guiding a single surgical tool to a single configuration.
An alternative may be a re-usable instrument with settings that are not patient specific, such as an intramedullary rod to reference distance femoral cut on the femur.
Therefore, such known methods and systems for configuring surgical tools would require the desired configuration of the surgical tool known in advance of surgery so that a positioning guide may be manufactured. This reduces the flexibility, such as in cases where the desired configuration may not be known until shortly before surgery.
Any discussion of documents, acts, materials, devices, articles or the like which has been included in the present specification is not to be taken as an admission that any or all of these matters form part of the prior art base or were common general knowledge in the field relevant to the present disclosure as it existed before the priority date of each claim of this application.
Throughout this specification the word “comprise”, or variations such as “comprises” or “comprising”, will be understood to imply the inclusion of a stated element, integer or step, or group of elements, integers or steps, but not the exclusion any other element, integer or step, or group of elements, integers or steps.
In the present description the term “position” reference to a position of an element may include a position of the element in two, or three, dimensional space and may also include the orientation of the element.